More on Mellel 3 and Spotlight

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Shelly Harrison
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More on Mellel 3 and Spotlight

Post by Shelly Harrison »

The Spotlight content fix in 3.0.1 works fine for files created or modified by Mellel 3, but I've just noticed that Spotlight still fails to find content in Mellel files created with earlier versions of Mellel and not subsequently modified. The only way I've found to handle this problem is to open the older files one-by-one and then save them, which is a rather tedious process. Is there an easier way? (I confess that I haven't tried completely reindexing Spotlight, which seems a bit excessive since only Mellel files are affected.)
Eyal Redler
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Re: More on Mellel 3 and Spotlight

Post by Eyal Redler »

I'm afraid that right after posting 3.0.1 we've discovered an issue with the spotlight importer under mountain lion. We will publish a fix soon.
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Shelly Harrison
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Re: More on Mellel 3 and Spotlight

Post by Shelly Harrison »

I don't mean to make this posting into a dialogue, but can I just ask whether fixing the ML issue you refer to will also fix the problem I described using Lion. I probably should have mentioned that I'm running 3.0.1 in Lion, not ML.
Eyal Redler
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Re: More on Mellel 3 and Spotlight

Post by Eyal Redler »

We were not aware of a spotlight issue under Lion. I will check both versions.
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ddauerbach
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Re: More on Mellel 3 and Spotlight

Post by ddauerbach »

Yep, quickview isn't working with 3.0.1
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Shelly Harrison
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Re: More on Mellel 3 and Spotlight

Post by Shelly Harrison »

I hate to have to raise this one again, but it seems that after the 10.7.5 mess and the Spotlight reindexing, I find myself with the same Spotlight content issue for Mellel documents that I reported earlier. Spotlight only finds content in Mellel 3.0.2 documents if those documents have been saved subsequent to the Spotlight re-indexing. If I open a Mellel document that has been saved since the re-indexing, pick some word or phrase in the document, and search for documents with that word or phrase, Spotlight finds that Mellel document. If I repeat the exercise with a document has not been saved since the reindexing, Spotlight will not find content in it until I save the document. Again, the only general solution I've found for this issue is to open and save every Mellel document on my hard disk, which would be just a bit tedious. Am I the only one having this problem?
Eyal Redler
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Re: More on Mellel 3 and Spotlight

Post by Eyal Redler »

First, make sure Mellel 3.0.2 is the only copy that you have installed. Otherwise, the system might pick up the spotlight plug-in from the other copy and it might not work as well.
To check you can do the following
1. Open the terminal (Applications/Utilities/Terminal)
2. Type mdimport -L
3. It should output a long list of plug-ins, look for Mellel there (you can use command+F to search this window) and see if the path there is indeed the path for Mellel in the applications folder

Following that you can cause the system to re-index your spotlight database by following the instructions in this site:
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2409
Eyal Redler
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Shelly Harrison
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Re: More on Mellel 3 and Spotlight

Post by Shelly Harrison »

The only Mellel mdimporter that shows up is the one at the path:
/Applications/Mellel.app/Contents/Library/Spotlight/SpotlightPlugin.mdimporter

I can do a re-index of course, at least of the Document directory where all my Mellel documents are (to save time), but I do wonder whether it's going to help. Spotlight re-indexed itself completely just four days ago, after I installed the patch to fix the 10.7.5 update problem, and the content searching problem with Mellel was there immediately so far as I could tell. Of those formats for which I expect Spotlight to find content, only Mellel documents seem to have this problem—pdf, rtf, doc, docx, all seem fine, whether freshly saved or not. But if you still think that a (complete or partial) Spotlight re-indexing will fix the problem, I'll do it.

(I don't know whether it's relevant, but after the Spotlight reindex four days ago Mellel documents did not seem to immediately show up in Quick View form when selected in column view in the Finder. There seemed to be a delay of some minutes before all Mellel documents showed up as Quick View. But even after that, the document content was still opaque to Spotlight unless the document is opened and saved.)
Eyal Redler
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Re: More on Mellel 3 and Spotlight

Post by Eyal Redler »

Please try to re-index, at least one folder, to see if it helps.

Please understand that with these issues the Mellel plug-in needs to work with the system and both parts (plug-in and system) must work correctly.
As far as I know, the 3.0.2 spotlight plug-in does work correctly on Lion and therefore I suspect the problem is in your system, possibly a side effect of having a faulty plug-in installed in the past.

If all fails, please contact us directly and send me a sample file
Eyal Redler
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Shelly Harrison
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Re: More on Mellel 3 and Spotlight

Post by Shelly Harrison »

My apologies for lack of faith! Re-indexing the directories containing Mellel documents seems to have fixed the problem.

Of course, I'm still curious about why the issue arose in the first place. And that is not just idle curiosity. The issue has cropped up twice for me in the past month and a bit, and I would really like to avoid it coming up again if I can. If there is some nasty side-effect lurking in the system that will trigger this problem in future, I'd like to find its source and eliminate it. In that regard, I might mention that in the course of trying to fix the 10.7.5 update issue, and on advice from Apple, I reinstalled the system using the 10.7.5 Combo installer. So the system itself should have been clean, though I guess that might not have affected application-specific plugins.
Eyal Redler
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Re: More on Mellel 3 and Spotlight

Post by Eyal Redler »

Great to hear everything is OK. Regarding why this happen, I can't really say a lot about the reason. I guess the buggy spotlight plug-in that came with 3.0/3.0.1 didn't help but the spotlight system is a bit quirky. I also think that apple are moving very boldly ahead with Lion and Mountain Lion and this sometimes comes at the expense of the quality control.
Eyal Redler
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